healthy delicious food

Breakfast

Chocolate granola, dairy free cashew yoghurt and berries, each individual element can be kept in your fridge and used to make different breakfasts throughout the week.

From simple yoghurt and berries to a bowl of chocolate granola and nut milk and jam on toast! This recipe makes enough granola to last you a week or two – it never lasts to the second week in my house!

I am so excited to announce that from 1st March 2017 I will be a food Ambassador for Honestly Healthy!

Along with 24 other superstar ambassadors I will be providing regular recipes for the Honestly Healthy website and community that you will be able to access on the Ambassador recipe page on their website!

All recipes will be vegetarian, free from gluten and dairy and most importantly full of all the stuff that is good for you!!

I have been following Honestly Healthy for some time now and am so honoured to have been chosen as part of such a select group of foodies, nutritionists and fitness experts. I will post all recipe links on here so keep watching out for them!

Buckwheat – those little round seeds that make the texture of the granola so crispy and wonderful. Buckwheat despite the name is actually gluten and wheat free. I have made granola many times but this is by far my favourite. Plus it takes less than 20 minutes from start to finish, and will save you consuming so much sugar that you find in shop bought granolas. Pimp up your smoothies with a sprinkle of this or serve simply with some ice cold nut milk. Delicious (if I do say so myself)!!

First turn your oven on to 180 degrees. Then combine all of the dry ingredients in a large mixing bowl. Chop your nuts into pieces but make sure they are to too tiny, you want them to add some texture to the granola.

Next put the coconut oil in a small saucepan to melt on a low heat. Once melted and completely liquid, add the remaining wet ingredients. Use a whisk to combine them together.

Gradually add the wet mixture to the dry mixture, stirring as you go. Line a baking tray with baking paper ( you may need 2 trays to spread out the mixture. Pour the granola mixture onto the tray and spread evenly with a spoon. You want the mixture to be about a centimetre thick…any thicker and it wont cook underneath.

Place in the oven for 20 minutes, check halfway that it is not burning in any areas, you amy need to turn the tray. Remove the granola from the oven when it has turned a golden colour all over.

Leave to cool before removing from the tray so that the clumps of granola stick together. Store in a jar and enjoy!

Easy peasy green juice, made from lots of veg so it contains very little sugar compared with a fruit juice. These quantities make a large bottle (around 1 litre) that you can keep in the fridge for a couple of days.

Make sure you wash all of the fruit and vegetables really well before juicing. For this recipe you will need a juicer, I know they are a pin to clean but making a big quantity of juice like this really makes it worthwhile.

Chop the apple and fennel into quarters and place in the juicer with the remaining ingredients. Remember to chop the skin and white part beneath the skin of the lemon off, otherwise it will make your juice really bitter. The ginger you can leave the skin on, its where all the goodness lies!

Once all of your fruit and vegetables have gone through the juicer, transfer the mix into a large jug or even better a jar, and give it a really good stir or shake to combine all of the ingredients.

Here are couple of recipes from our healthy eating and fitness week Uma Retreats in Lake Como! I prepared some healthy snacks to accompany our exercise from post cardio energy balls, to protein bars for our mountain hike. A few of the recipes are listed below, the most loved was for sure the Coconut Balls, so few ingredients but so delicious.

First place the nuts and the coconut in your blender. Pulse until finely chopped. Then add the remaining ingredients and blend until completely incorporated. Roll the mixture between your hands to form golf ball sized balls, about 2 tablespoons of mixture per ball. Roll the balls in desiccated coconut to coat, then place them in the freezer to set quickly or in the fridge.

Raw Cacao Bites

For the cacao version of the coconut balls follow the same recipe and method, replacing the desiccated coconut in the balls with 1/4 cup cacao nibs. I also omitted the chia seeds in this receipe.

Simply place all the ingredients in a blender and blitz until smooth. If you do not have protein powders other alternatives would be a tsp wheatgrass or spirulina and a handful of nuts or a spoon of nut butter for added protein.
Top your smoothie bowl with whatever you fancy, fresh fruit, bee pollen, chia seeds, goji berries or my personal favourite…GRANOLA 🙂 see the recipe for delicious homemade granola here.

In a jar or an airtight container combine all the listed ingredients and stir or shake well to thoroughly combine the seeds with the milk. Place in the fridge overnight, this allows the seeds time to expand and soak up the liquid. In the morning your breakfast is ready for you…it couldn’t get much easier! Top your chia pot with fresh fruit or granola.

I hope you enjoyed my brief breakdown of our Uma retreats recipes! Check out our website umaretreats.com and come join us for our next retreat and sample these for yourself!!

I made this smoothie today, I’ve been off work and sat at home ill, feeling fluey and full of cold. I’m not a fan of taking medicines, and I had kinda lost my appetite (great news for the waistline!! haha) so for lunch I decided to make a smoothie. One that would not only fill my stomach but also try to help get rid of the cold I have. Turmeric and ginger are great natural healers, both help fight inflammation. I have to say I did feel almost instantly perkier!

Simply place all the ingredients in your blender, be sure to remove the stone from the date! You do not need to peel the ginger, a lot of the nutrients of the root lie just beneath the skin. The protein powder is an optional addition, but its great to boost your protein and keep you full.

Enjoy slurping on your yellow smoothie, and hopefully boosting your immune system at the same time!

Another accidental recipe. A quiet weekend at home, with not much in the fridge so I made this loaf with what I had…carrots and bananas. A kind of mash up of carrot cake and banana bread, and it actually turned out to be delicious. The carrots combined with the banana mean that it is not too sweet, perfect for breakfast with a side of yoghurt! And its made with coconut oil and maple syrup and absolutely no refined sugar…a cake thats tasty and good for you!

Heat your oven to 180°, and prepare a bread tin by greeting the inside with a little coconut oil, I usually use my hands to do this to make sure it gets into all the corners.

In a small saucepan, gently heat together the coconut oil, maple syrup and cashew butter. While this is heating roughly chop the walnuts, wash and grate the carrots on the wide setting of the grater. Mash your bananas in a separate bowl.

Once the coconut oil has melted, stir to combine with the maple syrup and cashew butter. Then stir in the bananas.

Place the carrots, walnuts, flour, ground almonds, bicarbonate of soda and baking powder in a large mixing bowl and stir together. Add the wet mixture and stir again. Finally break in the two eggs and mix throughly until all ingredients are combined.

The mixture will look very wet, but trust me it will be fine! Pour into your loaf tin. Scatter a few more chopped walnuts on the top.

Cover the tin with tin foil – allowing space for the loaf to rise.

Place in the oven and cook for 30 minutes, then remove the foil and cook for a further 30/40 minutes. You want it to slightly brown but still be soft inside. Remove from the oven and allow to cool in the tin.

Turn out and cut into big thick slices, serve with a dollop of yogurt!

This really tastes like you are having desert for breakfast! Sounds pretty great doesn’t it…plus of course its all healthy, no sugar or dairy. Carrot cake is definitely one of my favourites, and this tastes just like the raw cake mixture! It is best to make this in the evening and by breakfast time the mixture will have soaked up the milk. And don’t be put off by having vegetables for breakfast, carrots are naturally sweet and add a great texture, plus this will keep you full for hours I promise (well if you have a portion the size I had)!!
Serves 2-3.

I used organic carrots which were quite small, so you may wish to just use one large carrot. Wash the carrots thoroughly, I did not peel them so you want to make sure you get rid of all of the dirt. You can peel them if you wish but most of the nutrients in veg are found close to the skin. Grate the carrot on the corse side of your grater. Place the grated carrot in a large jar along with the oats.

For this recipe I used a mixture of spelt flakes, porridge oats, and buckwheat but you can use whatever combination you like.

Roughly chop the walnuts, not too small, they go slightly soft and add a great chunky texture to the muesli.
Add the walnuts and sultanas to the jar along with the milk. Give it all a good stir, add the cinnamon and vanilla if using and stir again so that all the ingredients are thoroughly combined.

Its as simple as that! Now just cover the jar and place in the fridge until the morning.

Serve your carrot cake breakfast with a dollop of yoghurt, a squeeze of agave or maple syrup and top with a few more walnuts.

The perfect way to get a hit of superfoods and power you through your day. Even if you don’t like the taste of wheatgrass but feel like you should be eating it, this recipe makes it much easier to hide the flavour of your least favourite superfood powders, also try it with the nasty green spirulina! I always experiment with energy ball flavours and have stock of them in the freezer, they are perfect for travelling or taking to work for a healthy energy kick. Take them frozen in your bag and they will soon be edible, freezing them helps the, keep their shape and makes it much easier to transport them!

As usual this recipe is super simple and speedy, first you want to place your almonds, hemp seeds and goji berries in a blender and pulse until they look like a fine crumble. then add your wheatgrass, bee pollen and dates and blend again on a high speed until the dates have completely broken down and the mixture is starting to come together. Finally add the remaining ingredients and blend again. The mixture should now be throughly combined and starting to clump together. Use your hands to press some of the mixture, you should see that it stays together. If not add a little more coconut oil or water.

Between your palms, roll a couple of tablespoons of the mix into balls, roughly the size of a golf ball, but the size is totally up to you. On a plate sprinkle a couple of tablespoons of bee pollen, roll each ball in the bee pollen to coat the outside.

Place your balls in the freezer to set. You can then keep a couple in the fridge if you want to be able to eat them straight away.